The succession of a whale carcass
The blue whale skeleton hanging from the roof of Hackett Hall at the Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip beached in 1897 near Undalup/Busselton. He is named Otto, after the taxidermist who stripped its flesh and bleached its bones in the sun. Otto was a late adolescent, a twenty-four-metre bundle of testosterone. How he died is unclear. Usually blue whale strandings are a result of disease that weakens and disorients them, and they usually die before they beach. Orcas, however, are known predators. One study suggests nearly half of blue whales photographed off Western Australia have scars consistent with an orca attack, and a pod of orcas was recently filmed killing a juvenile blue whale off the south coast. When a whale dies, their decomposition gases can build and float the carcass. Sometimes the carcass will float to shore. Most of the time, they are scavenged by sharks and sink to the ocean floor.
Up to 4000 metres deep, an ecosystem adapted to the remarkable good luck of a whale fall will rapidly colonise the carcass. The worms of the genus Osedax are among the first to settle in and the last to leave. They feed exclusively on whale bones, dissolving them by secreting acid and consuming their fatty interiors. Considering how niche their food supply is, they are highly diverse with over thirty species—some whale falls have several species of Osedax even within the same bone. They are one of the most sexually dimorphous genera known to science. The female worm is a few centimetres long, while hundreds of microscopic males live their lives entirely inside the female, allowing it to constantly reproduce and release fertilised ova across the ocean depths. It only takes a few years for a whale’s bones to be consumed. After that, it’s a long wait until the next whale fall, but some Osedax will be there, somehow, in spite of outrageous contingency and a whale population about a tenth of what it was in 1897.
Whales have a powerful symbolic complex in many cultures. In cultures of European origin I think this is similar to the cultural construction of the piano. Pianos and whales are the largest in their categories. They are often anthropomorphised. Interacting with them is portrayed as an encounter with the romantic sublime. They resonate with a certain kind of stoic, cosmopolitan individualism. In states of decay, ruined pianos and whale falls have a similar pathos. I’m drawn to stories of whales’ ecological succession in part because pianos, let alone synthesisers or computers, don’t have that luxury. Their metals and plastics will remain for much longer than Otto’s bones, even if they’re strung up in a museum.
These symbolic complexes occasionally intertwine in narrative. Béla Tarr’s film Werckmeister Harmonies depicts a communist-era Hungarian city, visited by a circus show whose main attraction is a rotting whale carcass. The carcass entrances the protagonist, a newspaper delivery man, who is also entranced by his composer uncle’s musings on how the piano’s equal temperament introduces chaos and disorder to humanity through its imperfect harmonic structure. Only by adopting the principles of just intonation, he opines, can humanity align itself with the harmony of the spheres. The circus incites a violent uprising, a brief and misguided revolt where the dissidents realise their own inhumanity before the government violently cracks down on them. The composer, shaken by the crackdown, tunes his piano back to equal temperament. The film ends as he stares into the whale’s eye, the rotting spectacle that proved the human project cannot be reformed.
Jane Campion’s film The Piano has a famous shot of a grand piano boxed up and stranded on a New Zealand/Aotearoan beach. The beached piano might, at a stretch, resemble a cetacean stranding. Few acts of nature inspire more of a sense of the tragic futility of life than a whale stranding, particularly when they are still alive and dying under their own weight. The beached piano here is framed as a tragedy of the demise of white colonial order. This contrasts with how whale strandings are celebrated in some Indigenous Australian cultures. There’s a Wirlomin Noongar (south coast of south-west Australia) story of a young man who jumps inside a whale through its blowhole and sings a song taught to him by his father, compelling the whale to carry him along an ocean songline. They journey for a long time, the man singing, the whale listening. The man decides to return home, but the whale wants to continue out to sea. He sings and pulls and stabs at the whale’s heart, but the whale keeps resisting. A hunt begins, the whale struggling to swim out to sea, the man coaxing it back to land. Finally, the whale relents, defeated, and brings him to the beach, where the whale dies. The man emerges from the beached whale, and teaches his people song over a great feast and celebration. “After a long time,” the story goes, “the whale became part of the sand and the rocks of that beach, and part of all the people there.” I still wonder what happened to the several tonnes of Otto’s meat, blubber and cartilage.
There is another symbolic complex at work here: whales/pianos as vessels of masculine energy and subjects of masculine conquest. “My work deals with evoking, provoking, and then externalising male energy,” says a young Charlemagne Palestine in this unbelievable 1979 news segment about his piano performances. “If you take them to their final conclusion”—he starts flailing his arms like a swan—“… eh… eh… esch… esch… ESCH… ESCH… ESCH… ESCH ESCH ESCH ESCH ESCH ESCH ESCH ESCH… it borders on, perhaps, madness.” His improvisations on Bösendorfer grand pianos are intense and oppressive, as if the piano in all its enormity is too small a vessel for his testosterone. They often begin tenderly from a rigid structural idea like a repeated 3-over-2 rhythm, before spiraling out of control. A vague sense of order quickly gives way to unmediated aggression. The sound is less interesting than the whole gesture of the performance, the tobacco pipe so rigid in his mouth he might just bite it in two.
I used to be heavily invested in the piano and a value system that reveres authentic expression, virtuosity, immanence, and liveness. They culminated in an EP that I released in 2012 through Flaming Pines. Over the next few years I realised these values don’t express anything too innate. Indeed, they are often used as criteria to police what kinds of culture are worthy of institutional support. So I stopped playing and started researching DAWs. Critical material analyses of what it means to make music in the 2010s seemed more constructive to me than channeling those values into the bottomless trough of platform-based content. Still does. But playing piano again has been really nice. It feels lighter. More people are critical of pianos than DAWs so I feel less burdened by the usual tendency to over-intellectualise it.
Last month, nearly ten years after that EP, I played a grand piano set at Aesoteric, one of the rare events in Boorloo/Perth where underground and experimental musics are given a high-budget treatment, let alone a piano. It was at Boola Bardip, under Otto’s skeleton. I’ve released the recording of the performance on Bandcamp. You can listen to it here.
My relationship to this recording is more exhausting than it should be. It was kind of the dream gig for twenty-year-old me, as much about fulfilling a dilapidated fantasy of my former self as it was about making critical work. It’s nice if you don’t mind the occasional bung note. I hope it’s not understood as programmatic or some kind of musical representation of the succession of a whale carcass. Maybe that reflects a change in my life where I'm less interested in turning music into published content than I am in music-making as a method for creating concepts. The music isn't about anything to me, but making it helped catalyse a synthesis of divergent ideas that are fun to think about and wouldn't have happened otherwise. It's an approach I recommend if you're feeling like your practice is yelling into an ever-deepening void. Market forces and platforms will keep trying to flatten and decontextualise all music into a featureless, antiseptic patina. If we have more agency to contextualise our work, I think it can make the work lighter, less burdened by needing to be understood in an environment as hostile to artistic self-determination as a streaming platform. It's an unfinished thought, like this music. A succession, maybe.